Powerpoint: Who need's the America's Cup?

By GREG DIXON

Well, I certainly was strumming air guitar to some glorious stomping anthem last Sunday as the Warriors marched, then staggered, then charged for glory.

The living room was my stadium, the poor neighbours my audience and We Are Almost The Champions my song as I leaped about like a hungry dog in a butcher's shop when the final hooter pooped victory.

Let me remind you, if you need it: the Aussies wrote us off; we won.

Stick that in your waltzing tucker bag and smoke it, Oz.

And, yes, it was damned fine television, too. Sky Sport provided us with a studio full of well-informed boof-heads, led by Stephen McIvor and Peter Ropati, to fill out the feast, with Ropati urging our boys to "get in there and snot 'em ".

Mind you, this didn't stop fellow panellist and former Kiwi rep Tawera Nikau casting himself as nay-sayer.

"My head says the Sharks, my heart says the Warriors," he said with his wild-eyed stare as the game approached.

The Aussie in-game commentators weren't too keen, either. They reckoned the Warriors to be "struggling" for most of the game.

With our boys 6-0 up at half time, Nikau's head was racing down his neck towards his heart. By full time he seemed happy to wolf his just deserts: a bit of stick from the other Sky boys for his early doubts.

Good man.

But it wasn't just the deserved result last Sunday that left me feeling that rugby, whether league or union, is a fine sport for television.

These are games which are perfectly formed.

With only 80 minutes to play, two halves and a close-up crowd yelling like chained demons, these are sports that offer dramas played out on a small, well-defined canvas. For home viewers, league and union are packages which generate a quick, happy anxiety because they're fast, slick, demand instant individual heroism from their practitioners and undying faith from their fans. They are short, sharp snapshots of life.

Not so America's Cup and Louis Vuitton racing, which snailed its way on to our screens this week.

I was beside myself with tension last Sunday -- partly because I feared the gale, then thunderstorm, in Auckland would blow away my wonky TV aerial before full time. Beyond this Sunday -- when the Warriors will hopefully triumph again -- or perhaps the end of union's NPC, I don't really care whether the aerial goes Awol.

Putting aside the matter that the America's Cup involves a bunch of rich prats playing with themselves in our backyard every four years, watching match race sailing on television has to be duller than a slow day in Palmerston North.

Yes, there are two boats for each race and one must win. But televised yachting has all the tension and drama of a crippled cockroach derby filmed in slow motion, compared to league, union ... well, most team sports.

America's Cup races seem to take hours. Collectively, they go on for months. They seem to add years to your life through the boredom of their existence.

Even motor racing -- which surely ranks among the lowest forms of television entertainment -- has crashes to liven it up.

To try to give this Yank Cup thing some life, TV One has commentator Peter Montgomery shouting a lot while endless computer-generated graphics show us who's actually in the lead. But ask yourself this: what sort of sport needs a PC to tell you who's winning?

Call me the television Taleban, but I say it's not one worth giving a wild, cheering damn for.

The reality is this: Stacy Jones and the lads are televised sport's Elvis right now.

Dean Barker and the rest of those affluent sailor boys can only be mistaken for that crooning fool Pat Boone.

And I really wish someone would, as they say on Sky Sport, snot'em off my screen.